website: document the Checkpoint service and how to disable it

This is documented for all other Hashicorp products using this service but
was missed for Terraform. This serves as a disclosure of the fact that
Terraform reaches out to a Hashicorp service, an explanation of the
purpose of that request, and instructions on how to disable it in
environments where it is inappropriate or cannot be supported due to a
firewall or other connectivity restrictions.
This commit is contained in:
Martin Atkins 2017-07-18 08:59:02 -07:00
parent da0aec1b32
commit f6dace3476
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@ -72,3 +72,41 @@ Usage: terraform graph [options] PATH
read this format is GraphViz, but many web services are also available
to read this format.
```
## Upgrade and Security Bulletin Checks
The Terraform CLI commands interact with the HashiCorp service
[Checkpoint](https://checkpoint.hashicorp.com/) to check for the availability
of new versions and for critical security bulletins about the current version.
One place where the effect of this can be seen is in `terraform version`, where
it is used by default to indicate in the output when a newer version is
available.
Only anonymous information, which cannot be used to identify the user or host,
is sent to Checkpoint. An anonymous ID is sent which helps de-duplicate warning
messages. Both the anonymous id and the use of checkpoint itself are completely
optional and can be disabled.
Checkpoint itself can be entirely disabled for all HashiCorp products by
setting the environment variable `CHECKPOINT_DISABLE` to any non-empty value.
Alternatively, settings in Terraform's global configuration file can be used
to disable checkpoint features. On Unix systems this file is named
`.terraformrc` and is placed within the home directory of the user running
Terraform. On Windows, this file is named `terraform.rc` and is and is placed
in the current user's _Application Data_ folder.
The following checkpoint-related settings are supported in this file:
* `disable_checkpoint` - set to `true` to disable checkpoint calls
entirely. This is similar to the `CHECKPOINT_DISABLE` environment variable
described above.
* `disable_checkpoint_signature` - set to `true` to disable the use of an
anonymous signature in checkpoint requests. This allows Terraform to check
for security bulletins but does not send the anonymous signature in these
requests.
[The Checkpoint client code](https://github.com/hashicorp/go-checkpoint) used
by Terraform is available for review by any interested party.